Active Interventions for Behavioral and Cognitive Change

Abstract

All psychotherapies are based on the processes of learning and directed behavioral change. However, the sectarian schools of traditional therapy differ considerably with regard to their emphases on these processes and the roles given to instruction and direction on the part of the therapist. Obviously, behavioral and cognitive therapies are the prototypes of active, directive, and didactic psychotherapy. From behavior therapy’s earliest days, when its ideology flaunted its roots in the laboratory and in learning theory, until today, the behavior therapist has been considered an educator, a director, and a guide to change. Overt behavioral change is both the method and the goal of this therapy, and it is almost impossible to think of a behavioral intervention about which this point is not true. Pioneering behavioral techniques such as systematic desensitization (Wolpe, 1958) were introduced openly as action-based substitutes for the then-current methods (experiential and psychodynamic), which were not focused on immediate change. The ongoing testing and refinement of interventions that are derived from classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning paradigms share this over riding concern (Glass & Arnkoff, 1992).